There and back again…

Tikal is one of the places I have been looking forward to seeing on my trip. It was a bit of a struggle to get up though as I had to pack my bag for leaving as I would leave it at the hostel and pick it up later.

The bus picked us up at 5am and then we drove round to pick a few others. It would be amazing to see the sunrise at Tikal, but we actually saw the sunrise on the road. We arrived Tikal around 6:30am. I decided to join a tour as I think that having a guide in a place like this is worth it.

Tikal is an amazing place. Until now I would have said that Palenque was my favourite ruin, but I think that Tikal takes that place now. The ruins themselves are spectacular and much bigger than what I had seem previously, but also the setting in the jungle is amazing. Our guide said that they would build a new series of pyramids every 20 years as the celebration of the major divisions in the Mayan calendar. The huge pyramids are actually a series of building built onto of one another. Some have five levels of buildings on top of each other.

One of the interesting things about Tikal was the references to human sacrifice. Most of the references to blood sacrifice we had seen in the other ruins, except for Chichen Itza had been about the blood sacrifice of the ruling classes. At Tikal there was much more open about the human sacrifice. Some of the altars in front of the pyramids were used for execution and sacrifice. There was a lot of climbing up on the pyramids which gave you amazing views of the pyramids rising from the jungle. This was the same shots used in Star Wars for the rebel base on Yavin IV. Though I never got to see the Quetzal (the national bird of Belize) we did see some Hornbilled Tocan (the national bird of Belize).

One of the thing that strike me when wandering through these ruins is just how sterile these places are. They would have one time been the centre of activity of huge cities containing hundreds of thousands of people. The temples would be surrounded by priests, warriors, peasants and the ruling classes. There is none of that buzz and only echos of the past. It would be fascinating to see how it actually was.

I had time to get a late breakfast of an omelette before catching the bus back to Flores. In Flores I picked up my bags from the hostel and then caught a tuc-tuc to the bus station. This was another micro bus and it cost my 50Q to get to the Belize border. This time my big rucsac was able to go on the roof. It was very cramped again in parts of the journey as more people were loaded into the bus.

I walked across the border and out of Guatemala to Belize. This was the first border I’ve walked across on this journey, all the others have been flying into places. Unfortunately I was unable to get a bus on the opposite side of the border and had to get a taxi for 15USD to San Ignacio. I asked the taxi driver to drop me off at Hi-Et guest house which was suppose to budget. They didn’t have any dorm rooms though and the next rooms were 20USD a night. I tried to look around for something cheaper but there was only rooms for 40 B (20USD). Eventually I found a hotel for 35 B. It was nice but I would rather stay in a hostel as when you are travelling by yourself a hotel only increases the isolationism. I paid for 2 nights and then found a laundry to get some washing done. The owners of the hotel I stayed in were a really nice old couple. The Plaza Hotel was clean and good value for what it offered, but I would have preferred a hostel. They were also nice enough to phone round and get me on a tour going to the ATM cave in the morning. The price for this was 65USD.

After getting sorted out I wandered around town to get something to eat. Everything is so expensive in Belize. I suppose that’s relative though. Its not as expensive as Cuba, but much more than Guatemala or Mexico. I have heard this about Belize though. Because it has not real industry, except for tourism they have to extract as much as possible out of the tourists.

Had breakfast and then packed my bags and got ready to leave. The great thing about Finca Ixobel is that they run a tab system similar to La Iguana Perdita, but it runs on honesty. So if you get a soda from the fridge you write it on your tab. So I paid my tab and got a micro bus to Flores.

Micro buses are so dangerous, worse than Chicken buses. They are small minibuses that they cram so many people into it. In the end I think I counted 25 people were there was space for 15 people. It was made worse because my big rucsac was also inside as there was no roof rack.

I arrived at the bus stop in Saint Elaine which is just over the bridge into from Flores. I walked down down through town and across the bridge to Flores. I found a small hostel mentioned in the guidebook (Rosa Goya). I was hoping that there would be a few people but there hostel was deserted, except for 4 people. In fact the whole town was deserted. I walked around for a while in the afternoon, but just ended up finding a quiet spot to read my book and write a few postcards. I was really disappointed by Flores and I don’t think there is anything here expect for a night to spend before doing Tikal. It also looked as though the whole down was undergoing some huge utilities upgrade as every street appeared to be being dug up.

In the evening I found a small restaurant just down the road from the hostel and had some chicken faitas. But as it was a very early start in the morning for Tikal I had an early night.

In the morning I signed up for a horse trek. This was really good fun and it was great to be back on horseback. I think I managed to get a bit better at the galloping but I need a lot more practise and some instruction. However my horse was a bit of a nutter and every time we set of to gallop he would head for the deep undergrowth and grass and head through that. I didn’t take it personally as it was pretty good fun. There was only time when my foot came loose from the stirrup and I had to slow him down so I could get it back in. The trek lasted around 2 hours and went round the Finca Ixobel estate which is 400 acres, its really nice around here and definitely somewhere I would like to return to at some point in the future. Seeing the world from the back of a horse is a pretty good fun.

I had a burger for lunch and then I signed up to do a cave trip to Ixobel Cave. This was just me and the guide. We walked through the Finca Ixobel estate and then into the jungle for a bit before we reached the cave. This cave was amazing. I think I liked this more because there were no tourists here; just me, the guide and the bats. There was no artificial lighting in the cave so the only lighting was from out flashlights or from the mouth of the cave. This made the whole cave more atmospheric.

We probably spent an hour in the cave but eventually it was time to leave. There had been a rain storm whilst we were in the cave, the first of the rains in this area. We walked back through the tail end of this storm but we had dried out before we got back. Just before we got back to the ranch the guide found a tarantula. I think this was a female as it was in a burrow. He was able to draw it out of the hole by pushing a blade of grass into the hole. This was huge, much bigger than anything I had seen before and though I was happy to take a photo I didn’t want to get too close.

Had an evening meal with the group again and chatted for a while before heading to bed.

The power was still out in our building when I woke the following day. Susan and I had decided that we would do a river cruise in the morning before heading up towards Flores. Walking back over the bridge we scouted out the buses to Flores and Poptun before we were approached by someone offering the jungle tours. The tour sounded OK and we paid 200Q. In hindsight we would have been better paying a bit more and getting a return trip to Livingstone. The river cruise was nice enough and we got to visit the fort of San Philippe.

But it wasn’t great value for money. I think that the intention was that you would spend most of your time at the fort and got swimming, but because we weren’t going to this the tour was over fairly quickly. We did stop for breakfast at Tortuglas which was really nice place. I had a breakfast wrap with scrambled eggs and chorizo. This was a great breakfast, perhaps that best I’ve had on this trip.

The boat dropped us back of at the backpackers hostel and then we were able to grab our bags from storage and then walk back over the bridge to catch the bus at 12:00. Because we were travelling to Finca Ixobel we had to transfer from the big bus to a smaller micro bus before we reached Poptun.

We got dropped of at the entrance to Finca Ixobel around 2:30pm. Finca Ixobel is one of the places that was highly recommended to me by Mike when we were back in Xpu Ha. It doesn’t really feature that much in the guide books but it’s a very beautiful place. We got settled in the dorms and then I washed my trainers which were starting to smell like a dead animal.

The set up is similar to La Iguana Perdita at Lake Atitlan in than there is an evening meal prepared that you can sign up for. It was great value and the food was great. In the evening played cards for a while and a few beers.

I had originally intended getting up early so that I could get to Rio Dulce in time for the Champions League final between Man Utd and Barcelona. In the end though I had a bit of a lie in and caught a bus to El Rancho at 10:30.

El Rancho is a staging post on the way from Coban to Guatemala City were the roads meet. I was hoping that when we got here there would be a bar that I could watch the match in. However nothing seemed to be open so I ended up watching the game through someone’s living room window. It was a rather bizarre situation but there was a few of us doing this and they didn’t mind and brought out some stools so we could watch it in relative comfort. I had to leave before the end, in fact I left before the second goal that sealed the game, but even when I left it wasn’t looking that good for Utd. They’ll be back next year though.

I met Susan at the bus station. She’s a nurse from Orkney and had been travelling up from South America though Central America. The journey from El Rancho to Rio Dulce took around 3 ½ hours and we eventually arrived around 18:00. We walked over the bridge which is the longest in Central America! The hostel we were heading to was Backpackers which is a fairly basic place under the bridge on the opposite site of the rived from Fronteras.

After a quick shower we had a meal at the restaurant. I had sweet & sour chicken was fairly nice but Susan had vegetarian lasagne which was a bit of a disaster. At first the lasagne was still cold so they nuked it for a while in the microwave but they forgot to bring it back so it got nuked again and they forgot it again so it was only slightly warm!

After eating I tried to get my banking sorted out to pay for my next trip to dragoman. For some reason this doesn’t seem to be working. Managed to get some emails of though but I will have to call my bank, which is so frustrating as none of the help lines are 24hours. It just isn’t set up right for international travelling.

Managed to get to sleep around 11pm but around 2:30am I was woken by my bed shaking violently. At first I thought that two travellers were going for it on the top bunk and was about to say something when I realised that it wasn’t just my bed but the whole building that was shaking. I’ve felt earth tremors before when in Mexico and at Lake Atitlan but this was the first proper earthquake I have ever really experienced and its not something I would wish to repeat. The earthquake was 7.1 magnitudes and centred in Honduras. For such a big earthquake there was relatively little damage and only a few fatalities.

I woke early for the day trip to Semuc Champey. Breakfast and lunch was included in the price of the trip (270Q). After a quick continental breakfast of fruit and toast we got picked up by our guide, Charlie, at 7:30am. We then drove round Coban to pick up the others who would be in our group.

The road trip to Semuc Champey took around 2hours including a stop for a photo over the valley and another water stop at a café. The weather was pretty hazy so the photos over the valley weren’t up to much.

When we arrived at the National Park our first trip was a walk up to the viewing platform. The was a fairly steep walk involving walkways and stars cases. It wasn’t too long though and in no time we arrived at the platform that was built out over the valley. The view was absolutely amazing. We could look down into the swimming lagoons which had amazing blue and turquoise colours set into the green of the surrounding jungle. I was really looking forward to getting into these pools.

The geography of the river system is unique. The bathing pools are a series of rock pools set on the river. At first you would think that the river feeds the rock pools but actually the river dives into a cave system at the point where the rock pools starts and exits at the end of the rock pools so the rover has nothing to do with the rock pools which are actually fed by surface run off from the surrounding rain forest.

Before swimming we walked down to where the river enters the cave system. This was very impressive and the force of the river was amazing. We then had a bite to eat of lunch and got ready for the rock pools. I wasn’t sure what to expect really I just though we would be swimming in the rock pools. Our adventure was a little more hard core that this…

We started of swimming through a few of the rock pools and jumping and diving down through the pools from one system to the next. I was really concerned about how my ears would react to the water with the infection, but I was absolutely fine. Sometimes we would be climbing or scrambling down through short waterfalls and others we could clearly jump into the water below.

We soon passed beyond the point where most of the tourists get to and continue down to where the river returns to the surface. At the edge of the rock pools the guides got the rope they had been carrying out and tied this so that we could climb down the final waterfall. Karla was the first to attempt but was a bit put off by the water, Yael than had a go but also turned back. Everyone was a bit nervous by this time so I was next up. It really wasn’t that bad you just had to trust the rope and the footings was fine.

When we reached the bottom of the rope we had to crawl under the waterfall into a chasm which formed part of the returning river system. This was such an atmospheric cave with the river roaring beneath us. I almost expected Christian Bale to turn up and tell us to get out of the Batcave! We explored the cave system for a bit and then it was time to leave. The only way out, except for climbing back up the waterfall, was to jump from a rock ledge into the river below. This must have been at least 7m. but it was great fun. Karla took a few attempts but eventually managed to jump. There’s nothing like facing an adventure like this that bonds a group, so by the end we were all laughing and chatting like old friends. We then had to climb back up back up through the rock pools to reach where we had left our clothes.

From Semuc Champey we then left to go to the cave at Lanquinn. This was a dry cave system and full of interesting rock formations. This was cave system was used by the Mayan’s as a sacred site and in places you could see the soot from the all the candles that would have been used to illuminate the darkness. One point in particular was a sacrifice altar where the Mayan’s would have sacrifices animals. We were told that here there were no human sacrifices.

At one point we left the tourist trail and Charlie took us through a scrambling shortcut between two cave systems. On the way back out through the cave system Yael actually bumped into her friend who had checked out of the hostel the night before she arrived. They had actually left to stay at Semuc Champey and had left a message for her on facebook, but because she had been travelling and unable to pick up the message it never got through. On the way back Charlie managed to catch one of the spiders that live in the cave. These are like huge daddy longlegs but with huge pincers. Apparently they taste like chicken!

The best thing about Lanquinn though is to stay there until sunset when the bats come pouring out of the cave. Unfortunately we left around 4:30pm so we never got to see this. When we arrived back in Coban we agreed to meet back up at the central square to grab something to eat. There were a series of street vendors selling food around the square. We grabbed some food here, I had tacos with chorizo sausage which tasted really good. We swapped emails and then parted ways. Yael wanted to grab some mor food so Marco and I tagged along. The food at the restaurant wasn’t as good as that from the street vendors I wish I had got something more from the vendors rather than eating in a chain restaurant. All being well I should be able to meet back up with Marco in San Pedro Sulsa, Honduras, on 10th June when Honduras play El Salvador.

I got up reasonably early to visit the clinic again as I was at the end of my course of antibiotics. The doctor said that I still had some infection left in my throat. However he didn’t any Ciprofloxacin so I would have to buy these at the pharmacist in Panajachel. I walked back down the hill to the hostel and packed up my bags ready to leave. The bill for 6 days accommodation, meals and drinks and the diving course came to £138.00. Wow – that was great value!

Managed to get the boat back to Panajachel at 10:30 and bought some drugs at the pharmacy and then caught the chicken bus to Guatemala City. On the way there was a serious storm. As the rain started the driver stopped whilst a few of us climbed up onto the roof of the bus to pull some covers over the bags on top of the roof. The rain lashed down and at times the driver couldn’t see through the windscreen. Added to this the water was pouring down the sides of the road and I wasn’t surprised to see where parts of the cuttings had collapsed. The rain cleared though and we got to Guatemala City with no other incidents. I’ve not heard very good things about Guatemala City so it was only my intention to pass straight through and get the bus straight to Coban. When we arrived in Guatemala City I asked the bus driver how I could get to the terminal where the bus left for Coban. He suggested getting a taxi. I turned to one of the taxi drivers asking hime he knew where the bus terminal was. I am really kicking myself because I didn’t agree a price before getting in the taxi. When taxis do not run on meters this has to be the rule when travelling. The journey must have taken around 15minutes and the thieving b*****d then charged my 70Q. This is more than a taxi in London would have cost. I was so angry about this and argued about it for a while but the problem was my bag was in the boot so I couldn’t just get out and walk away. In the end I paid the 70Q but I learnt my lesson! The bus to Coban was a Pullman rather than a chicken bus which was much more comfortable than the chicken bus. The 4.5 hour journey to Coban cost 60Q. It passed without insident though I wish I hadn’t chosen the seat I was sat in as it was a little bit cramped. They seem to be a bit strict about sitting in your assigned seats on the pullman coaches so I tried to change but they won’t let me.

As I was getting of the bus there was a girl asking about directions to the Casa L’Acuna, a hostel which I had thought about staying in also. So I tagged along. Yael, from Israel, had been travelling for a while through Mexico and Cuba and was then heading down though Central America to Nicaragua and Panajachelma before heading home.

We got to the hostel which was a bit more pricey than I had been used to (50Q) but it was nice and pleasant. Yael had been hoping to meet some friends here, but on checking the guest book she realised that they had checked out the day before. We wandered round town to try and find an internet café as the hostel did not have internet or Wi-Fi. Unfortunately everything was closing so we returned back to the hotel empty handed.

I was fairly hungry having not eaten properly except for some tacos at the bus station in Guatemala City so I had a “Tropical Burger” (A beef burger with a slice of pineapple) at the hostel restaurant. This was really nice but it was a bit too late to be eating, but I was starving so what the hell! After this Yael and I decided we would book the trip to Semuc Champey for the following day.

This was the last day I was intending to stay here. The infection is definitely breaking now but I still have blocked sensation in the right ear which doesn’t appear to be to clearing. This is really annoying as I am having to rearrange the trip around this. I’ve already missed out on climbing the volcanoes around Lake Atitlan and I had also intended to visit Xela to climb the highest peak in Central America. I’m now planning the trip to give me as much time as possible between getting to Belize. I really want to dive the blue hole but obviously I don’t want to do anything to damage my ears or make it impossible to fly to Venezuela.

Anne and Rob did a dive in the morning whilst I chilled out with this new book. In the afternoon John, Anne, Rob and me played Trivial Pursuit. This was an American version from mid 80’s. Many of the questions, especially the entertainment ones were so American biased, they were impossible for us. That said I did pretty good with the History, Geography and Science questions. In the end John and I won.

It was a shame to think of leaving, but all good things finish and though it really was horrible to be ill, I was lucky to have been grounded at La Iguana Perdita.

I was starting to feel much better today and had an appetite to eat a good breakfast. The sunshine was out and more new people came today.

I was still having difficulty clearing my right ear, but the pain had subsided so that I only got an occasional stabbing pain instead of the unrelenting torture I had been suffering with. The weather this morning was also really clear, which always helps you feel better. I was able to reproduce some of the photos I’d seen on the screen savers on the computers here.

It was still a very relaxing day consisting mostly of sleep and reading the Diary of Che Guevara. I had an interesting chat with a couple who were going take over as staff members about the whole Che mythology. I have a few more books to read about this but I’m not sure that any of books provide any insight into his philosophy. But I think that I should read Das Capital. For the meantime though I’ve finished the Diary of the Cuban Revolution and I swapped it for a fiction book called Child 44 about a serial killer in the old Soviet Union. I think it’s based loosely around a series of real events and it’s certainly a fast paced book.

I met a couple from the Netherlands (Rob and Anne) and a British guy (John). We played pool for a while (losing badly to the Dutch!). The weather was unusally clear in the evening. There was none of the usual rain and we even had a sunset. I would love to come back during the dry season when this place would be so photogenic.

The meal tonight was a BBQ chicken, rice, salads etc. Afterwards there was a bit of a party. Dave who owns the place played the guitar for a while and then John did a set of his own material which was pretty good also. The party went on for a while but I was still exhausted from the infection so went to bed early.

Rachel left this morning she is hoping to make her way upto San Christobal to pick up some clothes she had left there and money that her brother was wiring to head to head to Mexico. I had given her the name of the dive shop in Mexico and mentioned the Dos Ojos cave.

I think this was my lowest day of the holiday so far. I was in a lot of pain during the day and for the first time for a long time I was struggling to eat my evening meal.

The infection started to break during the night I woke drenched in sweat. At least the antibiotics are starting to take hold.